Well then he would have posted a thread about 'I think I have a drinking problem and I need help, please give me some suggestions'.
Stopping drinking
- Thread starter Yoga Face
- Start date
Wazup I appreciate your directness. While I also appreciated the kindness of advice from others, I did not ask for it. Miss Croft has answered my question.
Antibuse is very dangerous and should only be prescribed in severe cases. Like when a patient has Cirrhosis and still won't stop drinking and even then I don't think it is used anymore. It is NOT the type of pill that should be used casually from time to time just to ease up on drinking.
I wonder if they have other medication that has less severe reactions ?
To me it is a pain pleasure thing. If the pain of drinking is more than the pleasure I will not do it. Severe alcoholics have to drink regardless of the pain it causes. I understand they drank while on antibuse and this caused death, which is something I would never do. I am on my third day of not drinking and I have not awoke with any desire to drink but I know I will tonight. The key is to keep busy until the liquor store closes.
I am opposed to liberating the liquor laws as limiting its availability helps those in my situation. An analogy is gambling. opening up a Las Vegas casino at woodbine race track is going to destroy families. I spoke to the counselor on site, as they have a small casino there already, and he said gambling is an escape. I suspect drinking is the same thing. Trauma can cause addiction as the addiction becomes an escape from the trauma.
I've heard some things about kudzu extract. Not likely to help a serious alcoholic but supposedly helpful for what you describe. People who take it are supposedly less likely to overindulge.
http://www.drwhitaker.com/curb-alcohol-cravings-naturally/
Site looks legit as it is not trying to sell anything. From stated article
Well over half of American adults drink, but just 20 percent of them consume 80 percent of all alcohol, and the top 10 percent—24 million people—average 74 drinks per week!
So, where do you fit in?
I would put myself around 40 drinks per week. I used to drink in the top 10 percent.
One thing to do is buy the low carb low alcohol drinks the are coming up with.
I should have been more specific, there were those like miss croft who offered advice, I was referring to those with the stupid comments like you doing some soul searching, apologies to those who offered topic related advice.
Get some help man and have your liver checked out. Its taking a big strain with that level of drinking.
I won't moralize as I did a lot of drinking and other things but its not good for your health
Two drinks a night over enough time will eventually addict you, but at that level the harm is relatively mild and comparable to things like driving a car. The problem is once addicted the amount goes up.
Forty plus drinks a week on a regular basis is suicidal. You need to outright stop drinking completely for a few months at least to detox. If your liver isn't harmed it is certainly under stress with fat deposits building up. A break from alcohol for a few months will give it time to heal and clear out the crud.
I used to drink too much, but never got anywhere near forty drinks a week as a regular thing. I would go out once or twice a week and drink maybe ten drinks each night out, with maybe once every month or so some crazy late night thing where I would drink maybe fifteen. Very rarely I would do the all night after party thing and drink until 7am but not I kind of just grew out of that and settled into a weekly routine of closing the bar once a week, or getting together at someone's house with a small group of drinking friends.
So maybe I averaged fifteen to twenty drinks a week.
I eventually decided I needed to stop doing that and identified that I had a set of friends who were basically drinking friends. Would get wasted every time I went out with them, really, all we every actually did was go drinking.
So I reset. I started cutting down the time I spent with that group of friends, or if I saw them, in other non drinking contexts. Like I would invite them to the shooting range in the afternoon instead of meeting up on Fridays after work.
Moving to the US let me reset again. New city, new friends, built my new social circle around other activities besides drinking. No one here expects me to be the guy who goes drinking all night.
Now I will go out for dinner and have maybe two drinks, and only in social settings. Sometimes I go out and just eat, don't drink at all. I'm down to maybe three or four drinks in a whole week now.
Long story short, if you want to change your drinking behavior you need to make other changes, around what activities you get involved in, and with who. You can't just stop drinking, you have to change to something else.
A 750 ml (12%) bottle of wine contains 5 drinks. My wife and I will split a bottle most nights with dinner. 2.5 drinks each over 5-6 hours doesn't seem like that much. If you're consuming 4 drinks over the course of an entire evening, it doesn't seem that excessive to me. Your liver will process 1 standard drink per hour.
There are stages in alcoholic liver disease, and depending on how far along you are the damage may be reversible if you stop drinking.
The first stage is fatty liver disease. Fat deposits start building up in your liver which causes the liver to swell. You almost certainly have this condition at 40 drinks per week for an extended number of years.
The good news is that if you stop some of the fat deposits can be reabsorbed resoluting in a healthier liver. Maybe not good as new, but really not that bad. Other things will likely kill you long before it becomes a problem in this case. Once the liver heals in this scenario a small amount of drinking, one or two a day, should be fine.
If you continue drinking excessively eventually liver cells start dying, and you wind up with scar tissue in your liver. This damage is irreversible at this point. The bad news is there are generally few or no symptoms until you are totally fucked.
The somewhat good news is that if you stop drinking it shouldn't get any worse. But in this scenario you need to stop, not just cut down, to avoid bad outcomes.
If you don't stop the cirrhosis worsens to the point where your liver can no longer function effectively and at that point you are fucked and the only form of good news would be if you can find a donor for a transplant you can add a few years to your life, but you will triage to the bottom of the list as if there is a non alcoholic who needs that liver doctors will judge they have a higher chance of survival as you would likely resume drinking and fuck up the new liver too.
The above is why I suggest you STOP drinking for maybe a year to let your liver recovery, so that in the hopeful case you only have some fatty liver deposits, you can return to a normal 1 to 2 drinks a day level of consumption without significant risk.
But talk to your doctor, the above is my own reading from the NHS and mayo clinic pages and your doctor will be able to give you much better advice based on bloodwork and other tests.
Usually it takes an act of extreme stupidity to make you quit an addiction.
Over a decade ago I got totally shitfaced and stoned at a strip club, then I drove home. I'd had over a half dozen beers and too many boob shots, also I did several supertokes with a stripper in the parking lot. The last thing I remember is someone attempted to take my keys away from me and failed. The next day I woke nauseous, after a strong wretch white terror struck me. I couldn't remember how I got home, I immediately went out to the car to check for dents. There were none. A wave of extreme relief washed over me followed by more nausea. I sustained nothing more than a horrendous hangover, to this day what happened after I left the strip club is a complete blank.
Since then I've been almost dry and I haven't touched the spiced cabbage since 2007. However cigarettes are a different matter.
Over a decade ago I got totally shitfaced and stoned at a strip club, then I drove home. I'd had over a half dozen beers and too many boob shots, also I did several supertokes with a stripper in the parking lot. The last thing I remember is someone attempted to take my keys away from me and failed. The next day I woke nauseous, after a strong wretch white terror struck me. I couldn't remember how I got home, I immediately went out to the car to check for dents. There were none. A wave of extreme relief washed over me followed by more nausea. I sustained nothing more than a horrendous hangover, to this day what happened after I left the strip club is a complete blank.
Since then I've been almost dry and I haven't touched the spiced cabbage since 2007. However cigarettes are a different matter.
I'm not much of a drinker, never have been. So I can't relate.
But off hand, 40 drinks seems like a lot. Plus we humans tend to bend the truth to whatever suits our argument, so 40 could be closer to 48.
Anyway, you're not alone I'm sure. First step would be talking to a doctor.
But off hand, 40 drinks seems like a lot. Plus we humans tend to bend the truth to whatever suits our argument, so 40 could be closer to 48.
Anyway, you're not alone I'm sure. First step would be talking to a doctor.
I stopped drinking when I developed an allergy to alcohol, maybe it was the sulphites. In my younger days I could drink like a tank. In the place I was born that's all kids did, and there was no age limit to buying alcohol. Good thing I got it out of my system at an early age, and have the allergy or reactiin cause I have no more urge to drink now. My only posion is coffee and women, dark and bitter.
I used electronic cigarettes to quit
On day one I quit real cigs
within two weeks I am off the electronic
this was 7 months ago
went on vacation a month weeks ago and buddies were smoking so I did to
smoked two packs to see if I would re addict
have not smoked since vacation and no urge to do so
amazing but results will vary as I was a never a heavy smoker
